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N.H.L. Is Playing on Its Home Ice

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the sight of a red-coated Mountie to dress up the Stanley Cup finals, to make them official.

The flitting visual image of a rugged Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, saluting with his right hand to the wide brim of his Stetson hat, serves as notice that two squads of bristly roughnecks are ready to whack each other around on the ice.

And the lusty sound of a crowd bellowing the words and eminently singable notes of the stirring “O Canada” is quite enough to reassure even the lapsed hockey fan that all is right with the firmaments, for the moment. The True North Strong and Free is back in the finals.

A real Stanley Cup finals is now under way between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins, two franchises with history and regional passion for the sport. The Mountie was spotted on television — along with ads for Tim Hortons and BC Ferries — moments before the face-off Wednesday night, with the starting players shimmying in place, as they always do. Makes you want to shimmy right with them.

The home team became stronger and stronger in the third period and finally scored a goal with 18.5 seconds remaining for a 1-0 victory. The teams will resume Saturday night way out there, near the mountains and the salt water and Stanley Park and the Asian restaurants in that glorious world city — in Canada, where a chunk of the N.H.L. belongs.

This is not a rooting choice of the Canucks over the Bruins, who come from their own region, with the Beanpot tournament and ponds and rinks and ice in the veins. The N.H.L. seems to be in the process of restoring its resources to the part of the world where ponds freeze over and people skate for the joy or the therapy of it. (“Oh I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on” — Joni Mitchell, “River.”)

Just the other day, Atlanta, for the second time in history, coughed up the puck. This time the Atlanta franchise is relocating to Winnipeg, a major Canadian city that never should have been abandoned in the first place. The N.H.L. needs all those cities where people obsess over junior hockey and know how to flood a backyard in autumn.

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Somehow I equate the Sun Belt-ization of the N.H.L. with the mortgage scandals and rogue banks and the spawn of subdivisions in deserts and swamps, the money lust of the past generation for which we are all now paying. Hockey got giddy, too, seeking oases too far from its soul, in places where ice never forms.

Now, hallelujah, the N.H.L. has seen the light. Just the other day, Commissioner Gary Bettman was quoted saying hockey should never have left Winnipeg, but he warned that residents had darned well better fill all 15,000 seats at the modest arena, in the absence of much corporate presence.

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Frankly, Commissioner, if you ask me, corporate presence is what got us into this mess. Corporate presence is the justification for the friendly folks at Madison Square Garden to tell longtime Rangers and Knicks fans, who have spent personal money over the decades, “Watch the game from under the rafters, if you can still afford it, you pikers.”

The slippage in the Sun Belt is a reminder that hockey still depends on longtime loyal fans, with hearts and memories. Franchise histories are always tricky as narratives of flops and jinxes and the like because current players (Cubs, Jets, Mavericks, etc.) have little relationship to past horrors.

Fans, however, remember this stuff, and so do journalists. It’s our job.

On Wednesday, as regulation time wore down, I could not help but remember another first game of a Stanley Cup finals, on Long Island, in 1982, when the Canucks and the Islanders were tied up late in the first overtime. The weary defender Harold Snepsts made a bad clearance from behind the net and Mike Bossy intercepted.

Before Bossy’s shot could find the cords with two seconds to play, Snepsts had broken his stick in a rage. When I talked to Snepsts about it in 1998, he was still of a mood to shatter the thing. The Canucks never did win a game in that series, and the same franchise lost to the Rangers in the seventh game in 1994.

So the Canucks have never won a Stanley Cup since being founded in 1970-71, and the Bruins have not won one since 1972, when Bobby Orr was young. Something good is about to happen, something good for hockey.

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Talk about losing streaks: no Canadian squad has won the Cup since 1993, when the Canadiens beat Wayne Gretzky and the Sun Belt Kings, and fans inexplicably set fires and destroyed cars.

Now the Canucks are back and the Bruins are back and Canada is back, and maybe Quebec can rescue another lost franchise from the outer edge of the universe. The N.H.L. is onto something. Critical mass of hockey enthusiasm. Ponds that freeze. And Mounties, with fingertips on a wide-brimmed Stetson.

Correction: June 11, 2011

A Sports of The Times column on June 3 about the traditional matchup in this year’s Stanley Cup finals, between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins, misstated the type of vandalism that occurred in Montreal after the Canadiens beat the Los Angeles Kings to win the Stanley Cup in 1993. Fires were set and cars were destroyed; trolley cars were not overturned. (They had been taken out of service years before.)

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on June 3, 2011, on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: N.H.L. Is Playing on Its Home Ice. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe